Facebook Advertising – Its Pros & Cons

Facebook advertising created a buzz when it was first introduced and till date, it continued to grow in popularity. Better yet, it became a viable traffic builder with the advent of more targeting ads. In fact, you can now target Facebook ads specifically towards certain demographic factors including sex, age, education, and location. Facebook also have tighter restrictions when it comes to the quality of ads. In short, Facebook ads crated a great advertising platform for both large and small businesses.

However, like every other advertising and marketing platform, Facebook ads come with certain pros and cons.

Pros:

While talking about the advantages of Facebook advertising, the first thing that comes to mind is its customer reach. Facebook, at present, has around 400 million customers including 100 million mobile users, which is too good to be ignored. Though Google Adwords continues to be a viable platform to reach more numbers of targeted customers, usage time on social channels is rapidly increasing. Thus, overlooking the potentials of Facebook advertising is like running backward.

Facebook advertising provides the option of PPC or CPM, whereas other advertising networks offer one or the other. Thus, you can opt for the CPM advertising if your focus is on exposure and awareness; alternatively, businesses interested in providing more information and conversion can select PPC advertising. However, you need to understand your audience before deciding on a particular form of advertising.

Another benefit of Facebook advertising is its increased targeting ads. Facebook can dissect and segment its users’ information. Advertisers can leverage upon this special feature of Facebook. Better yet, this social media giant provides real time information, helping you to reach more specific targets.

Finally, Facebook ads are extremely successful with local clients. It allows you to target local customers, which in turn, helps in generating better leads.

Cons:

For businesses that are more focused on click through rate and higher conversation rates, Facebook advertising is yet to create a wonder. In fact, it has a low conversation rates for ecommerce, as people use this platform mostly for socializing. Buying something on Facebook is usually the last thing they have in mind.

Also, the PPC cost is higher for niche markets. People also complained about the weird and irrelevant ads on Facebook. Moreover, the advertising platform of this social media channel is filled with humor sites, free giveaways and reward programs, which often make the ads less relevant.

Despite the few pitfalls, marketers believe that Facebook advertising has the potential to become a traffic builder. Facebook also made significant progress in the past 18 months, in terms of improving their advertising model. And we sincerely hope that team Facebook will overcome the few pitfalls its ad platform has and will truly become a viable traffic builder.

About Debajyoti Banerjee

Debajyoti Banerjee is Founder & CEO at Seven Boats Info-System- a leading strategic Internet Marketing company, Digital Marketing Trainer, Entrepreneur, Web Strategist & Internet Marketing Consultant in Kolkata area, India. Deba helps other businesses to transform their online presence, to attract new leads and to convert their prospects by his expert web consultancy. Get in touch with him on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or Twitter